Excerpt from Lectures and Papers on the History of the Reformation in England and on the Continent

Immediately after Mr. Aubrey Moore's lamented death, on January 17 last, many requests were made for the publication of the lectures on the Reformation, by which, perhaps, he was most widely known among the junior members of the Uni versity. This volume is the result; but it must in nowise be looked upon as presenting the lectures in anything like the final form contemplated by Mr. Moore, who had expressed his intention of rewriting them before publication. It is offered to his friends, known and unknown, as a memorial, and not as a finished and elaborate work on the subject of which it treats.

Mr. Moore delivered these lectures as the deputy of Canon Bright, the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History. He began to act in that capacity in Hilary Term, 1880, and from that time lectured regularly without a break in two out of the three terms of the academical year (the third term being devoted to informal He was announced to lecture in the Hilary Term of 1890, on the first day of which he passed to his rest.

The first two courses of lectures are dated 1882, at which time, if not before, the larger part of the fourth course was also committed to paper. The third course was written towards the end of 1883, or the beginning of 1884. All have been much revised, and in parts remodelled and condensed - the first course in 1888, the second in 1886, the third in 1887 while various notes show that the same treatment was being applied to the fourth course as late as the November of 1889.

The manuscript of the lectures was found to be unexpectedly perfect, though there are several gaps which have, to a large extent, been filled up from the note-books of some of his pupils, and various scattered papers and memoranda of his own, which he had never worked into the text. All such additions have been carefully indicated in their proper places.

The lecture now printed as the Introductory Lecture originally stood, in two sections, at the head of an early recension of the course on the Continental Reformation, which was found in a separate note-book. The latter portions of this early sketch have been worked up into and utilized for the course as actually delivered in recent years, but the open ing lectures were omitted, probably through want of time. They are now put in the forefront of this volume, not only because they seemed well worth preserving in themselves, but because they strike the key-note of the whole of Mr. Moore's lectures and writings on Reformation history.

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